Yesterday’s figures from the Office for National Statistics confirm that the British economy has returned to growth – news that should be welcomed on all sides. True, the damage wreaked by the crash, and by Labour’s long years of mismanagement, has yet to be fully repaired. But the trajectory is one to give the Coalition cause for satisfaction, not least given the repeated prophecies of doom from the Opposition benches.

It is easy, of course, to list the challenges to growth – the headwinds that may yet blow the recovery off course. But it is less appreciated that these have as much to do with our political culture as with our economic situation. Consider this week’s industrial dispute at Grangemouth refinery. An unprofitable plant has had to cut staff costs in order to remain solvent. In precisely the same way, Britain has had to cut its cloth to fit its reduced circumstances, scaling back unaffordable public spending and letting depressed wages and a devalued currency take the strain of the economic adjustment, rather than repeating the mass layoffs seen in Europe.

But Grangemouth reflects the wider economy in another way, too. On top of the basic realities of profit and loss has been heaped a large helping of class-warfare rhetoric. Jim Ratcliffe, the self-made billionaire who runs the refinery’s owner Ineos, was not praised for his acumen, for the jobs and wealth he has created, but castigated for his yachts and mansion.

In just the same way, figures ranging from the leader of the Labour Party to the Archbishop of Canterbury appear increasingly to operate according to Balzac’s maxim that behind every great fortune lies a great crime. They highlight – rightly – the fact that the economy remains divided between South and North, rich and poor. But their solution is not to create more wealth, but to redistribute it. Ed Miliband, for instance, ranges across the economy, denouncing those sectors that do not meet his personal moral standards. This is closer to the juvenile socialism espoused by that self-proclaimed revolutionary Russell Brand than to grown-up economic thinking.

There is no doubt that, despite yesterday’s GDP figures, Britain remains in a very deep hole. The deficit is still colossal. The growth we have seen is still closer to that of the pre-crisis boom than many are comfortable with – driven more by consumer spending and house price inflation than a significant revival of exports or manufacturing. And a stagnant eurozone is unlikely to help on that score.

To keep the economic momentum going, and to engineer a recovery that benefits all of Britain, we should not be squabbling about how to divide the cake, still less assuming that the good times are back to stay. Rather, we need to do the hard, necessary things that will help the free market work as it should. That means tackling monopolies and cartels in areas where competition is not working properly. It means cutting taxes to give people more of their money to keep, spurring them to save and spend more. And it means pressing ahead with supply-side reform.

A similar approach must be taken in terms of tackling the North-South divide (or rather, the London-Britain divide). Throwing billions into regeneration projects is no longer affordable, if it ever was. But government still has a role to play – for example by pressing ahead with the HS2 train line, over which Labour is displaying worrying signs of backsliding. Another urgent task for ministers is to eliminate the national pay-bargaining that sees inflated public-sector salaries crowd out productive private-sector jobs in some of our most deprived areas. The competitive advantage of such places is that labour is cheaper – so make it cheaper still with enterprise zones and tax holidays.

The Government also needs to redouble its efforts to reform the education system: the recent OECD figures showing that our young people are among the least literate and numerate in the developed world were a tragic reminder that our workforce is increasingly unfit for purpose in an age when earning is tied inextricably to learning. Growth may have returned – but if we are to turn recovery into sustained prosperity, there is still far more work to be done.